1115.org

I’m fast losing track of all the words that the Bush regime has redefined as they go along. The latest casualty? Sacrifice.

Brian Williams, in his recent interview, asked President Bush:

“The folks who say you should have asked for some sort of sacrifice from all of us after 9/11, do they have a case, looking back on it?”

To which Bush replied, as only Bush can:

“Americans are sacrificing. I mean, we are, we are, you know, we pay a lot of taxes. Americans sacrificed when they, you know, when the economy went in the tank. Americans sacrificed when, you know, air travel was disrupted. American taxpayers have paid a lot to help this nation recover. I think Americans have sacrificed.”

No one can possibly pretend the question wasn’t, you know, clear enough. Not even to someone of Bush’s formidable intellect, distracted as he must have been in his mind by internal debates on the comparative literary merits of Camus and Shakespeare. Williams asked, as clearly as you would ask if you were speaking to, say, an eight year old, about extra sacrifices the President should have demanded after 9/11.

If there was an extra sacrifice involved in paying taxes, Bush could only have meant that Americans made a big sacrifice by accepting his tax cuts without complaining.* That was the only change that Bush demanded we accept when it came to taxes. Let it be noted that, as is only fitting, the wealthiest among us made the biggest sacrifices.

As for “Americans sacrificed when, you know, air travel was disrupted“, I really think we are all better off not knowing what the Communicator-in-Chief meant. It sounds good till you start asking what he meant, and then it starts to disintegrate. Disrupted? That could only refer to the period immediately after the 9/11 attacks, when all planes were grounded. That was the only time air travel in the U.S. was disrupted, right? But Bush being Bush – that is to say, always internally distracted by weighty intellectual debates – he probably means the sacrifices we made by willingly submitting ourselves to extra security checks, by politely removing our shoes whenever we were asked, by not turning and bolting from the scene when we were pulled aside and asked to submit to a body search.

But this post would be seriously incomplete if I did not commend the President for resolutely refusing to exploit for political purposes all kinds of other sacrifices that Americans have also made without complaining. We kept on breathing air. No one can … I mean, we are … you know, we breathe a lot of air. We didn’t let the terrorists deter us from buying gas. We kept on pretending the economy had come out of the tank, so the terrorists wouldn’t have the satisfaction of knowing how much they had hurt the economy. And for the longest time, Americans kept on buying all the crap that was being out out.

* Of course, the entire Who’s Who list of the Democratic party complained about Bush demanding these sacrifices of the American people. Which just bolsters Bush’s continuing argument about how Democrats are really traitors determined to sell out this country to the terrorist fascists.